Digital Identity is the corner stone for internet security and is becoming pervasively important with the emergence of internet businesses and online services offered over the internet. As a direct consequence of this, many industry verticals like financial services, government, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceutical, retail, telecommunication companies and Web 2.0 small businesses are adopting digital identity (hence forth referred to as identity) technologies in their portfolio of offerings.
Identity federation (hence forth referred to as federation) is an important aspect of identity management solution which enables businesses to seamlessly exchange user information such as user name, credentials, attributes, and policy in a secure manner without compromising the identity and privacy of the user. One of the biggest problems that identity federation solves is the ability to provide web users with a true single sign on (SSO) experience across service providers who are within disparate domains or infrastructures. While SSO adds great value to the business in terms of improvements to, or perhaps complete elimination of, the need for user and password administration and in giving rich user experience to clients of the business, it does introduce many challenges in the areas of user privacy and trust between business partners among others including software as service (Saas) providers and business process outsourcers (BPOs).
In the recent years, vendors and customers of identity management products have been working closely to produce standards to address many of the challenges of identity federation in a uniform and non proprietary manner. This effort has led to the emergence of multiple specifications such as SAML1.1, SAML2.0, Liberty Alliance ID-WSF, Web Services Standards (WS-*), OpenID, etc.